Today, when sports fans are reeling from the shocking murder of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer in Jamaica, another story breaks from Tel Aviv, where Israeli agent Pini Zahavi says that jealousy of David Beckham wrecked the England team in Germany last summer. He also says that an England defeat will be an earthquake in football.
“People say that McClaren will stay on if they lose, but in my opinion the Press will drink his blood and will finish him,” said Zahavi in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper.
On the 2006 World Cup fiasco, he said, “There was a big problem with jealousy in the team,” Zahavi said. “It’s something that nobody has talked about before. A lot of players did not like the position of David Beckham. It’s not been talked about but it was one of the biggest things that hurt England in Germany. A lot of players did not like the ‘super player’ Beckham. They did not like his position in the team. “It’s a question that I really always ask myself. How the best players in the world were kicked out of the World Cup by Portugal? The key point there was that the key players who had to give 200 per cent gave only 30 per cent.”
“From my experience you have to play slow and very slow against England because their players like to run. Playing slow is the only way to play against players who cannot play without running all the time. When you slow the pace England players lose their heads. Individually England have the best players in the world if you take them one by one. Another problem is that Gerrard and Lampard cannot play together, that is a fact. Lampard cannot play for the England team and shoot all the time like he does at Chelsea.”
IN THE EARLY Nineties I used to call Pini at the Royal Lancaster. Sometimes it was hard to get hold of him but it was always worth the effort. He told me a lot of interesting stuff. We never met but I found him helpful and illuminating. This was a piece I did with him in 1992.
Pini Zahavi, a former Israeli sportswriter, is a jet-set football agent who brings players out of the CIS to find fame and fortune with clubs in the West.
On May 19th he had just flown in for the Sampdoria-Barcelona European Cup Final at Wembley, and was already fielding calls and visitors in his suite at the Royal Lancaster Hotel.
His schedule would take him back to Israel on May 21st, then on to Moscow on June 3rd, south again to the Ukraine, followed by three weeks at the European Championships in Sweden.In the summer he plans to move three players to Italy, and two of whom are not even in the CIS team.
Zahavi, an ex-football editor of Tel Aviv’s biggest newspaper,Yediot Ahronot, loves artistic football, and was a big fan of Dynamo Kiev, but since diplomatic relations between Moscow and Israel were broken off in 1967, he could not visit USSR.
“I admired the football of Kiev for a long, long time, but I had no intention of going there,” he recalls. “And then the breakthrough happened five years ago, a few months after perestroika started. Dynamo Kiev were in Germany at a training camp, and we decided to invite them for a friendly game. “
It was at this juncture that Kiev coach Valeri Lobanovsky proved himself a brave man. “He decided to come over without asking permission from the Government or even the Football Federation. He just said OK, and they took the first plane to Israel. That was really something because since ’67, it was as if Israel was on the moon. It was something historic. In the German paper Der Spiegel they said it was like the ping-pong match betwen China and America, that many people believed opened the doors between the two countries.”